Star Tribune, Monday, May 17, 1999
News with a View: When will the media call it war?
Norman Solomon
Nearly two months have passed since the beginning of NATO's air war
against Yugoslavia. After a shaky start, Washington's spin machinery
has done much to promote a war agenda -- with crucial assistance from
major U.S. news media.
Early on, top officials of the Clinton administration seemed to be
playing catch-up. "The problem is they didn't start the communications
until the bombs started falling," said Marlin Fitzwater, who spoke for
President George Bush during the Gulf War. "That's not enough time to
convince the nation of a course of action."
But overall, the White House has good reason to be pleased with the
national media. By late April, special U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke,
one of the key U.S. diplomats behind recent policies in the Balkans,
was handing out compliments. "The kind of coverage we're seeing from
the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and the
newsmagazines lately on Kosovo has been extraordinary and exemplary."
U.S. journalists have generally relied on official sources, with
frequent interviews, behind-the-scenes backgrounders, briefings and
grainy bomb-site videos. In contrast with the overt censorship forced
on Serbian media by Slobodan Milosevic, the constraints on mainstream
U.S. news outlets have been largely self-imposed. The media watch
group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting studied coverage during the
first two weeks of the bombing and found "a strong imbalance toward
supporters of NATO air strikes."
Examining the transcripts of two influential TV programs, ABC's
"Nightline" and the PBS "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," FAIR found that
only 8 percent of the 291 sources were critics of NATO's bombing.
Forty-five percent of sources were current or former U.S. government
and military officials, NATO representatives or NATO troops. On
"Nightline," the study found, no U.S. sources other than
Serbian-Americans were given air time to voice opposition.
Throughout the spring, among Pentagon briefers and U.S. journalists, a
popular euphemism for the continuous bombing has been "air campaign,"
a phrase that hardly conveys what happens when bombs explode in urban
areas. News organizations have been reluctant to use the word "war" to
describe NATO's activities. Cable TV networks have preferred "Strike
Against Yugoslavia" and "Crisis in Kosovo."
On the last Sunday in April, the lead front-page article in the New
York Times started this way: "NATO began its second month of bombing
against Yugoslavia today with new strikes against military targets
that disrupted civilian electrical and water supplies . . ." This is
in sync with a remarkable concept that has been widely promoted by
U.S. officials: While the bombing disrupts "civilian" electricity and
water, the targets are "military."
If cluster bombs were being used by Yugoslav army troops, one could
expect a huge outcry in the American media. But reporters and
commentators in this country made little fuss about NATO's widening
use of the 1,000-pound warhead formally known as CBU-87/B, which
shoots out thousands of jagged steel fragments at high velocity.
A week ago, London's Sunday Telegraph published a commentary by BBC
correspondent John Simpson, who wrote that "in Novi Sad and Nis, and
several other places across Serbia and Kosovo where there are no
foreign journalists, heavier bombing has brought more accidents."
Simpson noted that cluster bombs "explode in the air and hurl shards
of shrapnel over a wide radius." He added: "Used against human beings,
cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare."
But the U.S. media have devoted scant ink or airtime to these weapons'
more grisly aspects. And few news accounts have explored how the
enormous destruction of Yugoslavia's infrastructure is likely to lead
to widespread disease and civilian deaths, as is occurring now in
Iraq.
TV news coverage brings war into our living rooms, but as media critic
Mark Crispin Miller has observed, viewers "see it compressed and
miniaturized on a sturdy little piece of furniture, which stands and
shines at the very center of our household." The nation's TV networks
have shown awe-inspiring file footage of U.S. bombers and missiles in
flight. Rarely have viewers seen more than fleeting images of what
happens to the people underneath the bombs. For the domestic audience,
America's high-tech weaponry appears to be wondrous but fairly
bloodless.
As disastrous as the NATO attack has proven to be -- measured against
its initial announced purposes -- the human catastrophe experienced by
Albanian refugees was tremendously important in marshaling support for
this war from Americans. Yet news media have not dwelled on the
substantial evidence that NATO's military assault gravely worsened the
situation for its ostensible beneficiaries.
The media spin on the war is as much a matter of what has been left
out as what has been covered. For instance, U.S. media outlets have
rarely pursued tough questions such as: If humanitarian concerns are
high on Washington's agenda, why drop bombs on Yugoslavia and give aid
to Turkey? The righteous charges leveled by President Clinton against
the Yugoslav government about its brutal treatment of ethnic Albanians
could just as accurately be aimed at the Turkish government for its
repression of Kurds. But Washington and Ankara are NATO allies, and we
hear little about the large-scale torture and murder of Kurdish people
inside Turkey.
Also given short shrift has been the fact that the Rambouillet accords
-- rejected by Slobodan Milosevic in late March just before the
bombing began -- included provisions allowing for NATO troops to move
into all of Yugoslavia, a provision that no sovereign nation would
accept.
Appendix B of the Rambouillet text includes such sections as: "NATO
personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels,
aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded
access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] including
associated air space and territorial waters."
At the time, the U.S. news media were silent about this pivotal aspect
of the Rambouillet accords. Now, when pressed on the matter, many
journalists at big national media outlets say it's old news. But they
never reported it in the first place.
-- NormanSolomon's most recent book, ''The Habits of Highly Deceptive
Media,'' was published this spring. He is an associate of Fairness &
Accuracy in Reporting.
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